Max Clifford And The Facts

So Operation Yewtree – launched following revelations about the past life of Jimmy Savile – continues, and another well-known name is nicked. Yesterday’s addition to the roll call of the famous was Max Clifford, PR and damage limitation expert to many others. And, no doubt following the Leveson Report, the press were reporting the event more or less straight for once.

Happier times for Max and the Screws

That is, except for one thing: there was an insistence on linking Clifford with Savile, if only because the same team did the arresting. But the Police stressed that Clifford was being questioned under the third strand of Yewtree, that being “alleged complaints against other people unconnected to the Jimmy Savile investigations”. So the first thing we need to do is ignore the supposed Savile connection.

So what do we know about this case? The great Cliffus Maximus has had a long and colourful career, from being a publicist in the music business in the early 60s to his current position as scandal concealment specialist extraordinaire. He has a contacts list that includes politicians, business folk, sports personalities, people from across showbusiness and the media, and those giving personal services.

Yes, you read that last bit correctly: Clifford knows more than one, shall we say, “madam”. It was, after all, through his good offices that the story of Pamella Bordes and her apparently simultaneous dating of Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil, Donald Trelford and others was fed to the press. Ms Bordes was, as upmarket folks like to say, a “call girl”, or in ordinary speak, a prostitute.

I mention this aspect of the Clifford CV not for cheap titillation, but because there are already rumours circulating that the arrest may have had nothing to do with what he himself got up to. As a recent video shows, he may have caused potentially damaging revelations about others to be swept under the carpet. That in itself is an offence, but that is not why he was questioned yesterday.

As the New York Times has confirmed, Clifford was arrested in connection with two specific alleged offences dating from 1977. His own memoirs, previewed in a piece for the Observer magazine back in 2006, include the confession of serial womanising over many years. He organised sex parties in the 70s and 80s. As he put it, everyone was at it. Including him.

After leaving Belgravia Police station last night, Clifford told reporters “Anyone who really knew me all those years ago, and those who have known me since, will have no doubt that I would never act in the way I have today been accused”. But of course we don’t know how he was accused of acting. So that’ll be lots more nudge-nudgery and you should beware of pundits dropping heavy hints in the coming weeks.

But Max Clifford is not another Jimmy Savile – end of story.

Virgin Trains Twice Resurrected

The findings from the investigation by non executive Department for Transport (DfT) board member Sam Laidlaw into the shambles that was the bidding process for the InterCity West Coast (ICWC) rail franchise have now been published, and make only moderately grim reading for all concerned. In the meantime, Virgin Rail Group (VRG), far from being down and out, will operate ICWC for another two years.

New paint job stood down once again

That makes two extensions to a franchise term that was supposed to have ended by this year at the latest. And, as Christian Wolmar has pointed out, the deal to run ICWC until late 2014 is for VRG to operate under a management contract for a fixed percentage fee – which means the operation is a concession, rather than a franchise. How the Great Western franchise is handled now will be interesting.

So what of Laidlaw? Well, “the DfT used flawed and inconsistent methodology when guiding bidders on the amount of risk capital (known as the Subordinated Loan Facility) they would need to offer to guarantee their franchise against default ... the Subordinated Loan Facility figures resulting from the flawed methodology were then varied in a way that contravened franchise competition rules” is the important bit.

Translated into plain English, this means that First Group’s bid, which was riskier – it assumed growth would keep on climbing even after disruption due to HS2 construction – did not result in their being asked for a far larger guarantee in case of default. VRG estimated that the amount was short by at least £400 million. First’s share value fell by about £400 million after the award was pulled. Go figure.

However, Laidlaw also manages the most expertly diplomatic explanation to the apparent bias against VRG: “while there were inconsistencies in the way First Group and Virgin Trains Ltd were treated during the franchise process, the report finds that there is no evidence of a culture of bias against Virgin at the DfT”. That means it was only a few civil servants who wanted to see the back of VRG, not all of them.

The result, of course, was that ministers were told the deal for First to take over ICWC was sound, and when VRG gave notice of a legal challenge, were unaware of the problems until a last minute demand by the minister to look again and confirm the numbers brought the admission that caused him to pull the whole exercise. So what is Laidlaw recommending for the future?

I hate to relay this news, but “there is nothing in the report to suggest that the flaws discovered in this franchise competition exist in any other DfT procurements”, which is only going to encourage the DfT to carry on franchising. After all the expense of ICWC, one might expect them to at least pause and think. How would I call it? It’s fouled up once, and it has all the potential to do so again.

But using a concession system does seem so much easier. Small hint there, DfT.

Osborne Gets Fracking (Perhaps)

So the shale gas industry is being welcomed to the UK: the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, is looking to give “significant” tax breaks and even create a one-stop Government regulatory and licensing shop to encourage exploration. Those who contend that climate change is not happening and wind power is rubbish are as a result ecstatic.

Among those people are the critics of wind power who complain vociferously about subsidies, although they have no problem with the phrase “tax breaks”, which is another way of saying that shale gas is going to be subsidised. Nor will there be any problem with the hydraulic fracturing process for those in whose backyards the drilling won’t happen. Nor will there be any concern about the waste of water.

Each fracking of the rocks requires millions of gallons of water, which in turn contains chemicals. One solvent used in wells in the state of Texas recently has been linked to kidney and liver damage. Others are believed to be carcinogenic. None of this has appeared in a blatantly cheerleading article in the Maily Telegraph by Matt Ridley, who is concerned only with the thought of lower bills.

But that depends on reserves being economically viable, and over a sustained period of time: many wells in Texas are not sustaining output beyond their first year, and in the Blackpool area alone it is estimated that as many as 800 wells may have to be drilled. To many residents, this thought clearly does not occur: they must think it’s like coal mining, with one shaft being sunk. It is anything but.

This has caused local Tory MP Mark Menzies to stress that, despite his support for shale gas exploration, there must be effective regulation and that residents must be consulted on developments. That realisation could come much closer to home for Osborne soon enough: his Tatton constituency sits over shale beds which could prove very attractive to the shale gas business.

And, as Oliver Wright at the Indy has pointed out, the voters might routinely return Tory MPs with thumping big majorities, but had no compunction in dumping the deeply ambiguous Mostyn Neil Hamilton over his less than upstanding conduct and association with Mohammed “you can call me Al” Fayed. And, despite their liking for air travel, there was serious opposition to Manchester Airport’s second runway.

So if dozens of wells start up in what is a mainly agricultural area, Osborne’s enthusiasm may not be sustained. And if the water contamination that has apparently followed fracking in the US follows, that will make the locals more than sceptical. None of this seems, though, to be getting through to the right-leaning press, who simply call fracking a “trillion pound industry”.

That, of course, does not mean we necessarily need it here. Just a thought.

Stammergate Rolls On

After some of them were a little too keen yesterday to ridicule shadow Chancellor “Auguste” Balls for what they knew was his stammer, the pundits are today about-turning and pretending that it was all Balls’ fault, that he is now casting around for sympathy (he isn’t), and that it’s OK because the Labour front bench routinely heckle those opposite (as if the Tories and Lib Dems don’t).

The idea that Balls was playing the victim – after he had said “Sometimes that stammer gets the better of me in the first minute or two when I speak ... But frankly that is who I am. I don't mind that” and therefore clearly not doing so – was trowelled on by the obedient followers of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail, particularly Lobby chairman Tim Shipman.

“It is bizarre that Ed Balls ... expects any sympathy for his condition” frothed Shipman, showing his indignation at an event that he knew full well had not happened, and therefore demonstrating the kind of journalistic skills that will keep endearing him to the Vagina Monologue. His colleague James Chapman also span the whole affair expertly by suggesting everyone look over there.

“I thought [the] mockery of Balls was because he said [the] precise opposite of what he meant” explained Chapman. Both Shipman and Chapman needed the Indy’s John Rentoul to spell out exactly what had happened, which was that the Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, had pulled a fast one with his figures by including the 4G licences but not mentioning the fact.

Tory MPs were also excusing the hooting ridicule of Osborne and his pal Young Dave, typical being the attitude of Devizes’ Claire Perry, who decided it was OK because Labour do the same. It would be interesting to know when the opposition front bench last ridiculed someone on the Government side who has to occasionally wrestle with a speech impediment.

Meanwhile, to no surprise at all, no such thought was allowed to enter for the rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, where new teaboy Alex Wickham became distinctly tetchy when he was upbraided on his admission that he was “taking the piss” out of people with stammers. That he had the Zelo Street post quoted at him would have gone down like a cup of cold sick.

And the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole pretended that BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson had excused his yah-boo hectoring, by – just like Shipman – asserting that Balls had made his stammer an excuse. If he spins much more, Cole will only dig himself in deeper. This pantheon of dissembly, all desperately trying to make out that what they’ve done is someone else’s fault, is remarkable to behold.

But they all know they were wrong, and simply haven’t got the spine to admit it.

The Wind Power Demonisation

“Vote Blue, Go Green” was the slogan when Young Dave and the Tories pretended that they really cared about the environment and climate change. Six years of howling denunciation later, the Coalition is only kept from lurching ever further away from renewable and other low carbon energy by the restraining influence of the Lib Dems. Tory policy today is not even in the Greenwash category.

This was demonstrated recently when a Greenpeace sting showed that clueless Tory MP Chris Heaton Harris was trying to move his party against wind power, and had even encouraged the phony candidacy of James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole in the Corby by-election. There are plenty more in the party who are now on “wind equals rubbish” autopilot.

The stance is bolstered by a uniformly hostile stance from the right leaning part of the Fourth Estate: the Maily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Sun all routinely ridicule wind farms, and push the idea that they are somehow ineffectual and expensive. That the electricity they provide is in effect free – apart from maintenance and transmission – is not allowed to enter.

Part of the reinforcement of this stance is to cast anyone who argues in favour of wind power as intolerant, corrupt or stupid, and here the Tel’s pundits are in their element, as typified by Cristina Odone, who tells readers that “A fanatical and self-righteous green religion stalks Britain”, so nothing like the religion that looks to the church of Rome for its teaching, then.

Ms Odone pretends to be concerned about climate change, talking of “cautious experts” before predictably saying of the evidence “much of it [is] contradictory”, which the consensual position of the scientific mainstream suggests it is not, as Paul Nurse pointed out to Delingpole, which has caused Del Boy to unleash a more or less constant torrent of abuse in return ever since.

And Delingpole, that “interpreter of interpretations”, is also in the mood for a religious metaphor as he warns about “How the Green Taliban spreads its poison gospel”. Here, Del Boy says that a report suggesting that wind power may be a better bet than gas must be the result of corruption and stupidity, because of course he’s incredibly clever and it disagrees with his view of the world.

In support of his contention he cites Richard North, pal of Christopher Booker and a party to the article that caused the Tel to pay out libel damages and costs to Rajendra Pachauri, and then spins in favour of shale gas, while managing not to tell of the environmental costs, or the worsening finances of that industry in the USA, where it is supposed to be part of some kind of cheap energy miracle.

But the readers get to believe the anti-renewables line, so that’s all right, then.

Guido Fawked – Sneering At Disability

Children, as the creators of South Park observed, can be cruel, and that cruelty readily extends to those who find speaking – and especially in public, and under pressure – a trial. But most of them grow out of it, although, from today’s reaction to events in the House of Commons, not all, and especially not the rabble who inhabit the world of the Guido Fawkes blog.

Balls? So what, he's only a socialist

The target for the Fawkes folks was shadow chancellor “Auguste” Balls, who has readily confessed that he struggled for many years with a bad stammer, and he still occasionally trips over his delivery. But, rather than cut him some slack – as they would do for anyone on their preferred side of the House – the Fawkes crowd sees this as an opportunity to sneer at someone’s weakness.

I can say what I like, cos I'm on telly!

Their attitude is doubly compounded: Balls has a reputation as a political bruiser, and he has committed the heinous sin of serving Pa Broon, for whom the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines holds a singularly irrational and unpleasant hatred. So when Balls stood up to respond to The Rt Hon Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet, today and tripped over his words, Staines was ecstatic.

And so were his odious tame gofer, the flannelled fool Henry Cole, and new teaboy Alex Wickham, who has taken a worryingly short space of time to go from reasonable human being to first grade shit, and thus fitting in very well indeed. Indeed, it seems to have been Wickham who started the cat-calling as he compared Balls’ speech impediment to that of the late George VI.

Cole clearly thought this jolly witty and rip-snortingly funny, and so Tweeted what was not a pearl of wisdom so all like minded yah-boo boys could have a really good baying guffaw at the stupid boy who couldn’t get his words out. How he laughed! How spiffingly clever they all must have felt! Just think how super all the other right-wing froth merchants would think he was!

Wickham made no attempt to disown his thoroughly nasty act, but instead confirmed that he was indeed “taking the piss out of” people who stammered. Meanwhile, Cole was eagerly waiting to pounce on the next fluff of phrase, which he did like a true creep. He then added a bar to his Distinguished Creeping Medal, an act which will have had him hooting with self congratulation.

And then they all told their pals about the video! So they could replay the moment and sneer at the boy with the stammer all over again! Oh how terribly funny it must have been for them! Not for Staines, Cole and Wickham the thought that any one of them is only one accident, or medical incident, away from worse than a stammer. Not for them the idea of behaving like civilised human beings.

Behold a trio of utter human nonentities. That behaviour is the lowest of the low.

Murdoch Tried To Buy A President

[Update at end of post]

During his testimony to the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch portrayed himself as not being particularly interested in politicians: it was they who came after him, he insisted, and it would be nice if they would leave him in peace. Thus the owner of the paper that crowed “It’s The Sun Wot Won It” played down his influence over the political process, and deflected any suggestion of interference.

But revelations in the Washington Post this week have shown otherwise: while right-wingers were applauding Bob Woodward’s intervention against any kind of statutory instrument for the press in the UK, they were clearly unaware of the bombshell he was about to drop on their Stateside counterparts: Murdoch had actively tried to intervene in the Presidential campaign and run his own candidate.

Sound far-fetched? It isn’t: it seems that not only Murdoch, but also his sidekick Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) were unhappy about the field of Republican challengers to Barack Obama. Ailes got word to General David Petraeus out in Afghanistan wondering if he would like to consider entering the race on the GOP side.

It seems that Ailes was even prepared to take time off from running Fox News to manage such a campaign. This is not such a strange idea as it may seem: Ailes has advised Republican candidates from Nixon via Reagan to the elder Bush. Moreover, his knack for killer campaign interventions includes the now infamous Willie Horton adverts that did such damage to Michael Dukakis.

And if that were not enough of an eyebrow raising intervention from the Murdoch empire, it also seems that Rupe was more than prepared to bankroll a Petraeus campaign personally. The word to Petraeus was that if he was offered the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) he should take it, and otherwise resign and then run for President. In the event he got the top job at the CIA.

Ailes has now made out that his approach was indeed made, but that it was all a bit of a joke. But, as Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He then suggested that Kathleen McFarland, who relayed the message from Ailes to Petraeus, was acting beyond her remit, and that she wasn’t a significant contributor to Fox News. But the WaPo has the recording.

What we have here, as the paper’s comment on the affair puts it, is proof that Fox News is corrupt – McFarland asked Petraeus if he’d like the channel to do anything differently, for instance – and that Ailes is now trying to shoot the messenger to take the heat off himself and his boss. So as nasty as usual, then. But next time Rupert Murdoch pretends not to be interested in politics, remember this revelation.

Rupert Murdoch is still as venal and ruthless as ever. And don’t you forget it.

[UPDATE 21 December 1625 hours: Carl Bernstein has weighed in with a Guardian Comment is Free piece in support of his long-time colleague Bob Woodward, expressing his dismay that most of the US media either ignored the story of Murdoch trying to run his own candidate for the 2012 Presidential Election, or as their own Washington Post did, relegated it to the inside pages.

As he points out, had it been someone bankrolling a candidate on the Democrats' side, Fox News would have been all over it like a rash, and much of the rest would at least have mentioned it. But Murdoch and Roger Ailes got away with it, despite Ailes half-admitting that he really had sent his emissary to make a pitch to David Petraeus.

So, as Bernstein asks, did the WaPo sideline the story out of fear for Murdoch and his empire, or did they just develop a temporary news cycle tin ear? Worth a read]

Leveson Is Served (37)

PRESS FREEDOM WITH UNDERPINNING

This morning, the editors – less the not insignificant presence of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre – fetched up on Downing Street and filed in to see Young Dave, with the supposed intention of setting up a properly independent regulator without the statutory underpinning that Leveson proposed. Cameron is said to have given them the jolly hard word on sorting themselves out.

So a regulator underpinned by statute is a bad thing, then? This is certainly the view put forward by whingeing Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent, who has quite clearly spelled out that statute equals loss of free speech, no free press, and censorship. No democrat, in his view, would sign up to such a thing, because they love freedom so much.

Sad so say, though, Luckhurst is talking out of the back of his neck, and here I am able to cite Reporters Without Borders (for Freedom of Information) in support. They have released their 2011-2012 Press Freedom Index, which has awarded Syria, Bahrain and Yemen the worst rankings – to no surprise at all – while giving equal top spot to Norway and Finland.

Yes, Finland – a country which has an independent press regulator underpinned by statute. Maybe this is some kind of fluke: after all, groups like Hacked Off also cited Denmark and Ireland, which have a similar arrangement, and Luckhurst has condemned the latter as “not priz[ing] liberty as it should”. And he stresses that underpinning and regulation are somehow interchangeable.

So back we go to that Press Freedom Index, to see that Denmark comes out equal tenth and Ireland fifteenth. But what of the UK, and moreover, what of the USA, where there is supposedly no restraint on the Fourth Estate? Ah well. I have bad news for the Prof from Canterbury: neither country makes it into the top fifteen. They both lag well behind the three that practice statutory underpinning.

Worse, between Ireland at number 15 and the UK at 28 are Jamaica, Costa Rica, Namibia, Surinam and Mali, with Niger only one place further back. And the United States is way back at number 47. So Tim Luckhurst would have the UK aspire to be 19 places lower in the Press Freedom Index and openly sneers at the country that tops the table – and two others in the top fifteen.

Luckhurst is reminiscent of those Republican politicians who substituted belief in place of reality in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election, only to be dismayed when they lost, while everyone who had been looking at real world information was not. He is so damn sure of his righteousness, but every time some factual pointer emerges, it leaves him looking yet more foolish.

Murdoch Is Served (89)

RUPE IN DEEP STATESIDE DOO-DOO

Labour MP Chris Bryant’s Commons intervention yesterday evening, in the debate on the Leveson Report, has re-ignited the heat under Rupert Murdoch, and this time it looks to be personal and potentially very damaging indeed. Bryant claimed that Rupe’s troops, as I considered recently, did indeed bung a serving member of the US military for the Saddam Hussein “underpants” photos.

Moreover, the payment was not the trivial $900 to which the Murdoch empire has previously admitted, but well into the thousands of Dollars at the very least, with the possibility that it exceeded $100,000. On top of that, the payment is alleged to have taken place partly on US soil. The Indy has information suggesting that the contact was a National Guardsman and the meeting took place in the San Francisco area.

That involved a “senior” News International (NI) executive, which points to the involvement of someone very high up in the organisation. The Indy also goes into the detail of the payments, asserting that “several thousand Dollars” was wired to the USA. Bryant alleged that the balance – a rather larger amount – was paid in the UK using an account set up for the transaction.

Bryant further alleged that a laptop with data on the transaction was subsequently destroyed, all of which, together with calls for Rupe to release his personal emails, puts NI right back in the mire. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) must be looking on and wondering where to start: Murdoch is of course a US citizen, so there would be no problem with them taking him in for questioning.

But the story is not being universally covered, and certainly not splashed, in many papers: here we have an echo of Phonehackgate. Then, most papers ignored the story totally, with many on the right making the ludicrously wrong call that it was all a put-up job to get payback for Damian McBride. That was certainly the view of the odious Henry Cole, tame gofer to the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines.

So what has the Guido Fawkes blog, home to both these less than august individuals, made of this latest travail for their beloved Rupe? To no surprise at all, it is dismissed as a non-story, to the extent that Chris Bryant is today ridiculed by the Fawkes folks. The payment to the National Guardsman is shrugged off, The Great Guido accepting the Murdoch explanation without question.

One might have thought that, after getting Phonehackgate and the exit of Andy Coulson from Downing Street so wrong, the Fawkes rabble might at least stop and think this time, especially after Staines claimed yesterday that “Good stories earn credibility”. Well, thus far the quality of their stories has earned the Fawkes blog a mere 4% trust rating. That looks set to remain. Another fine mess, once again.

Kate – Gawd Bless ‘Er!

Where were you when the news of the Royal baby came? Sadly, for most people, the answer is unimportant: the ones who really matter are the ranks of hacks scratching around for stories that they can cobble together without costing their increasingly tight bosses any extra money. At newsdesks around the country, the opening of a rich seam of cheap column inches was manna from heaven.

No detail, no matter how trivial, was left without repetition and exaggeration, so Kate’s morning sickness had to include talk of vomiting, and not being able to hold down her food. Following right behind was speculation that this could mean twins, although it’s at least a 50 to 1 shot. That mere detail did not deter the Maily Telegraph, which led on this supposed revelation.

Then came the spin: the Tel told readers that this could bring economic benefits of “up to” £200 million, while not mentioning that the Royal wedding bank holiday cost the economy around £5 billion, with the Diamond Jubilee double bank holiday – well, you can work that one out for yourselves. But we would all feel better, which will no doubt comfort those with cold houses or empty fridges.

And, as we’re all up to date with social media, there was the obligatory trawl of sleb Twitter feeds. Favourites were Cheryl Curl (why?) and Kim Sodding Kardashian. Other utterly irrelevant Tweets came from the appalling Piers “Morgan” Moron, Olly Murs, “Sir” Richard Branson, and Boris Becker, who at least has the status of knowing all about bonking.

The Mail leads the speculative charge on where the baby was conceived: “so now we know what Wills and Kate were REALLY doing after topless photos were published”, which is then followed by “Baby can’t have been conceived in France where topless photos were taken”. Make your mind up time. The Mail also tells readers “Baby has its own Twitter account”, which it does not.

This outburst of low grade Phil Space journalism has also spread to the Super Soaraway Currant Bun, where baby name speculation is the order of the day. Male and female names are helpfully colour coded blue and pink. Sadly, whichever of Rupe’s downmarket troops put this piece together was not sufficiently sophisticated to know that “Frances” and “Sarah” are girls’ names.

The Sun also told readers “Doctors ... will replace lost fluids to keep dehydration at bay, boost her nutrition and monitor her progress”. So there you are – replacing lost fluids monitors your progress. Not a lot of Sun readers know that. But these are early days: there will be plenty of opportunities for all those who scrabble around the dunghill that is Grubstreet to share the rich harvest of howlers.

After all, who cares about accuracy when there are papers to sell? Same old, eh?

Will Whittingdale Step Aside?

The Commons Culture, Media and Sport committee is to hold yet another inquiry into press regulation. Seriously. This comes after much effort and expenditure was involved in producing the Leveson Report. Now, it’s none of my business to suggest what the eleven members of the committee get up to, but it does seem that all the ground on this subject has been covered more than adequately already.

And, despite the decision to hold the inquiry having apparently been taken last week, the committee’s website is yet to be updated with the information, although the press has clearly been tipped the nod. Moreover, the list of proposed attendees does appear to be highly selective – unless, of course, there are to be more names added later. And then there is the committee membership.

Since the memorable hearings where the Murdochs were grilled, Labour’s Tom Watson has stepped down from the committee, and Tory MP Louise Mensch has resigned her seat. In has come Conor Burns, a forthright opponent of the Leveson recommendations, to produce a formidable Tory triumvirate along with chairman John Whittingdale, and Philip Davies.

Now consider the attendees: Young Dave has been invited, but so too has Leveson himself. On top of that, the only other confirmed invitations have been to Lord Hunt, co-author of the proposals for self-regulation that Leveson concluded did not nearly go far enough, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, and an unspecified number of those who support the Hacked Off campaign.

So where are the invites to all the other editors? On numbers of papers sold, there must be a case to ask Dominic Mohan, Paul Dacre, Tony Gallagher, Lloyd Embley, James Scott, Dawn Neesom, and Hugh Whittow. And, for good measure, they might as well ask Kelvin McFilth along, and get Ian Hislop to do the jokes. And there is also the potential for conflict of interest.

Burns has already made his opposition to Leveson well known, as has chairman Whittingdale. Indeed, the latter was spinning the anti-Leveson line on The Andy Marr Show (tm) only yesterday morning. His friendship with those in the Fourth Estate was highlighted by Hugh Grant during the exchanges on the programme. So perhaps the chairman might consider recusing himself?

Don’t bet on it. But do bet on many of those selected for grilling being better briefed than some of the committee. And look for the likes of Conor Burns letting his views get in the way of his ability to make a useful contribution to any inquiry, while other new members, for instance Labour’s Steve Rotheram, will be instinctively sympathetic to change, given his campaigning over Hillsborough.

Zelo Street will be monitoring this inquiry carefully over the coming weeks.

Boris Gets Leveson Wrong

Forming a basic understanding of what has been proposed by Lord Justice Leveson is proving difficult for those on the right: yesterday it was Andrew “Transcription Error” Gilligan who was getting it wrong, and today, London’s occasional Mayor and regular collector of “chicken feed” from the Maily Telegraph, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, does little better.

Cripes, can't get the hang of this Tweet malarkey, chaps!

Bozza has decided that the real culprit in all of this is not the press – which, by remarkable coincidence, bungs him £250k a year for his weekly column – but the web. Moreover, Leveson should have been looking there, and not at his pals who scrabble around the dunghill that is Grubstreet. It is remarkable that an intelligent man should even think about coming out with such baloney.

To demonstrate the central flaw in Bozza’s argument, we need go no further than the title of the Leveson Inquiry. This was into the “culture, practices and ethics of the press”. That, folks, is why Leveson did not, and could not, delve into the world of social media – because his terms of reference did not permit it. Bozza once again fails in the application of “five minutes’ Googling”.

But his wanting to dump on all those who inhabit the world of Blogs, Twitter and Facebook is entirely understandable: here, after all, are all those rotten folks who showed up his cycle hire scheme and its spiralling costs (costs to Londoners, that is, not to sponsors Barclays), the waste of money on a vanity cable car, and the potentially larger waste of money on 600 vanity Boris Buses.

This is why Bozza is so wary of social media: the notion that he has any concern about Alistair McAlpine’s welfare really is coming it. And his citing the Daily Mail for bravery in naming the alleged killers of Stephen Lawrence is no better: the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre made a typically cynical calculation that they didn’t have the means to sue, and he’d sell more papers.

Johnson might not look so blatantly partisan if he even bothered to report accurately what Leveson has proposed. He has not: like Gilligan before him, all manner of exaggeration is deployed to frighten readers into believing that the law might be used to keep any new press regulator under the thumb of politicians and lawyers, while the opposite is rather more adjacent to the truth.

No, the reality is that Boris Johnson does not just dislike social media, he dislikes any media that is not uniformly favourable to Himself Personally Now. Hence his pre-election outburst at the BBC’s Tim Donovan for, er, doing his job, and his attempt to silence Sonia Punnell for reporting things called facts (about him). His pals in the press are nice to him, which means they are by definition beyond reproach.

So no wonder Bozza wants Leveson to “look over there”. Crikey readers! Oo-er!!

A Shot In The Dark SUV

You may not have heard of Jordan Davis. After all, he lived in Florida, and was only seventeen years old. And he died a few days ago. But it was the way he died that tells you all you need to know about gun ownership, racial attitudes, and the law in today’s United States. It all happened the day after Thanksgiving, at a filling station somewhere in the sprawl of Jacksonville.

Davis was with three other young men in what those Stateside call an SUV. They had the sound system turned up – as do so many in the UK. It’s a personal thing. Then Michael Dunn and his girlfriend arrived on the scene: she got out of their car to visit a nearby convenience store, and Dunn, who admitted later that he had had a “couple [of] drinks”, took issue with the volume of the SUV’s sound system.

Dunn told the youths to turn it down – a strange thing to take issue on, given he and his partner had only stopped off for a few minutes – and they naturally ignored him. He then drew a handgun and pumped eight rounds into the SUV before calmly returning to his car, and driving off once his partner returned from her visit to the convenience store.

Six of the bullets missed their target. The other two struck and killed Jordan Davis. Dunn’s licence plate was noted by other motorists and he was picked up later. Then the fun really started: Dunn claimed that someone in the SUV had a shotgun and he was therefore acting in self-defence, citing Florida’s now notorious “Stand Your Ground” law. There was no shotgun. Dunn was charged with murder 2.

By now, just in case you hadn’t picked up on it, it should be clear that there is another snippet of information I had not included: Jordan Davis and his friends were all African Americans. Michael Dunn was an older white man. And the “Stand Your Ground” defence is the same one used by George Zimmerman after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin – another unarmed young African American.

At least this time the shooter was arrested immediately and jailed, unlike the Trayvon Martin case where Zimmerman remained at liberty until public outcry forced the hand of the law enforcement authorities. But it once again raises concerns that young black men are somehow perceived as a threat not for any other reason other than that they are young black men.

Combine this with the Second Amendment, and that so many US citizens feel that they have to carry weapons – Dunn was a gun collector – and you can see a potentially lethal mix of fear and firepower. Yet no politician dare do anything about it, such is the power of the gun lobby. So another life is cut short, with the perpetrator facing many years’ opportunity to repent at leisure.

So remember the name of Jordan Davis. But, sadly, he won’t be the last.

Gilligan Gets Leveson Wrong

The kind people at the Sunday Telegraph have kept Andrew “Transcription Error” Gilligan busy by letting him loose on the Leveson Report, and their reward has been a typical slice of slanted and occasionally downright dishonest copy which does not survive a cursory examination. “The devil is in the detail” he tells readers, and he is dead right – the detail of his own piece, that is.

He pauses momentarily to find adversely upon the Hutton Report – wonder why that might be, eh, Andy? – before asserting that Leveson’s “guarantee of media freedom” would “almost certainly” mean less freedom. Then he misleads readers with the idea that the state would specify much of what the proposed independent regulator does, which it would not. Validation is merely a quality control check.

Then Gilligan moves to complaints – remember, the now discredited PCC was expert at fobbing off these, especially when they came from someone who was not the subject of the offending article – where Leveson would have the new regulator accept “third party complaints”. This does not trouble the papers when it is the BBC getting those third party complaints, of course.

Here, he performs a sleight of hand which fools nobody: talking first about accepting third party complaints, and then talking about groups that have made submissions to the Leveson Inquiry, which is something totally unrelated. So Leveson accepted the submissions Gilligan mentions? So he also accepted hundreds of other submissions. This is a total red herring, but par for the course with Andy.

Gilligan claims that third party complaints will mean lobby groups being involved. On what basis? Do they get involved in third party complaints to broadcasters? Ah, but his real concern is stuff like Wind power. Here, he is worried about being forced to show “balance”, but what he really fears is that the likes of his pal James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole will not get away with another of his hatchet jobs.

Del Boy and the Tel saw off the last complaint against them by deploying a combination of the “Littlejohn Defence” (in other words, “it’s only an opinion piece”) and having their interpretation of science taken as fact. What frightens them is that a truly independent regulator might give equal weight to the complainant. If that had been applied previously, Delingpole would have had to withdraw and apologise.

And to put the lid on it, Gilligan shows his unhappiness at the thought of being prevented from “discriminatory reporting” because it would allow all and sundry to hide behind that rotten Political Correctness, while he lays into a group which made a submission to Leveson by smearing it as harbouring Islamists, and therefore highlighting the kind of discriminatory reporting that shames many newspapers.

So Gilligan, too, opens mouth and inserts boot. No change there, then.

Clegg And A Mail Fabrication

The press believes it can get its own house in order. And then its most celebrated gang of shock troops produces a piece of hackery so twisted and partial that they collectively shoot themselves in the foot. And, as the blood starts to flow, it proves that those saying the Fourth Estate cannot get its house in order were right all along. Also, to no surprise at all, the target has spoken out against them.

Of course I kick f***ing Clegg, can't abide the c***

“Clegg's £12m favour to charity backed by his wife: MPs demand inquiry into huge payment” is the lead story in today’s Mail On Sunday, which is nominally edited by Geordie Greig, but conforms to the diktat of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre. The readers are intended to believe one thing, and one alone: Corporal Clegg personally arranged a bung for his wife’s benefit.

Except he didn’t, and bizarrely he didn’t even approve the grant, to Booktrust, which has committed the heinous twin crimes of donating 40 million books to schools over the years, and inviting Miriam González Durántez so speak at one of their functions. She in turn has committed the crimes of being Spanish with malice aforethought, talking foreign, marrying Clegg, and not adopting his surname.

In other words, Ms González Durántez was merely a guest speaker for, and occasional advocate of, Booktrust. It’s not her charity, and the grant to it was green lighted by Michael “Oiky” Gove. But Gove has done as the press require MPs to do over Leveson, and so he gets a free pass while Clegg gets it in the neck. So has he intervened in the awarding of grant money?

Sadly for the Mail On Sunday, no he hasn’t, although the MoS claims that an advisor to Clegg “referred in conversation” to his wife’s attendance at one of their fundraisers. That is all the MoS has, although it also has comments from “A Whitehall insider”, which is more than likely a Dacre gofer dispatched to walk up and down Whitehall and take a few snaps. I kid you not.

Then there is the suggestion that public money is being wasted: Lancaster House is described as a “grandiose venue” hosting a “lavish reception”. It’s a Government property. And then the MoS gets rent-a-quote Tory MP Peter Bone – no doubt with the approval of Mrs Bone – to give them an agreeable line on how dodgy it all looks. If only Bone engaged brain before chasing yet more cheap publicity.

The result is that a charity that has been obtaining Government grants since 2004 – that’s before Clegg even took charge of the Lib Dems, let alone got into Government – gets smeared, just so the Dacre doggies can put the boot in on someone who is not doing as they wish on press regulation. There is no other credible reason why this jumped up hatchet job has been allowed to see the light of day.

And there will be more, until Clegg does as Dacre wishes. No change there, then.

Leveson Is Served (36)

NOW THE ESTABLISHMENT SPIN

The dishonesty and dissembly has started: Tory MP John Whittingdale signalled part of the line this morning on The Andy Marr Show (tm) as he tried to suggest that lots of people who have backed the full package of what has been proposed by Lord Justice Leveson are going to have second thoughts. Thus he fraudulently assumes that his pals in the Fourth Estate will succeed in their propaganda efforts.

That the Hacked Off petition has already passed the 100,000 signature mark (at around 1120 hours today) after being started only three days ago does not seem to enter the world of Whittingdale, who like his party leader appears to believe that the press will, on its eighth attempt, miraculously manage to sort its act out and produce genuinely independent self regulation.

This will somehow emerge from a meeting next week convened by Lords Hunt and Black, whose last minute proposals to Lord Justice Leveson did “not go nearly far enough”, and which will be chaired by the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre, who is not known as the Robert Mugabe of Fleet Street for nothing (Dacre was another who did not impress Leveson with his ideas).

What will come out of this meeting will, as with the Hunt and Black final submission, not go nearly far enough. Dacre is frightened witless that any successor to the failed PCC might mean the end of his being able to bend it to his will: his idea of being able to “edit with freedom” (the reason he turned down Murdoch) extends to the freedom to ignore any external body until his paper is at the courtroom door.

So there will be no proposal for an independent system of self-regulation: whatever is put forward may be claimed to be so, but it will be another case of caveat emptor. There will be no kind of quick and inexpensive arbitration and settlement mechanism unless it can be routinely hobbled by editors and owners, and potential claimants fobbed off with the kinds of excuses that made the PCC so utterly laughable.

Moreover, it will be glaringly obvious that whatever is offered up will not be good enough, and any industry observer knows that already. And so do the politicians – so why does Young Dave even pretend otherwise? Simples. His calculation is that the press will be nice to him for giving them yet another last chance, while dumping on Corporal Clegg and Mil The Younger big style.

This, in the Cameron reckoning, will make enough of a difference to get him and his party over the majority line in 2015, and by then the furore over rejecting Leveson and continuing to let the press please itself will, he hopes, have died down. It is the kind of calculation that can only come from a member of the establishment. It is crude and cynical. And I have to tell him that, on this occasion, it won’t work.

Top Six – December 2

So what’s hot, and what’s not, in the past week’s blogging? Here are the six most popular posts on Zelo Street for the past seven days, counting down in reverse order, because, well, I’ve got to go out later this morning. So there.

6 Cyril Smith And Child Abuse Second week on the chart for this post. Past allegations against the late MP were back in the papers this week. Here’s the original story from Private Eye, published in May 1979, which shows what is being investigated.

5 UKIP – Open Mouth, Insert Foot The party’s candidate for the Croydon North by-election was allowed to give his opinion on gay marriage and adoption. This was excellent sport, but not good for his credibility.

4 UKIP Fails The Protest Test The party was held to have broken through in three by-elections which it did not win. Thus it did not even do as well as the old Liberal Party, which at least won many contests.

3 Common Purpose Paranoia Following the Mail’s going overboard at training organisation Common Purpose were James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole and the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines. But nobody was out to get them. Allegedly.

2 Leveson – Letts Tell A Few Whoppers The odious Quentin Letts (let’s not) attended the Leveson presentation, did not take notes, and spent much of his time talking to someone in the row behind him. So it was no surprise at all to see him making much of his report up. As I was also there, I was able to correct him.

1 Leveson Is Served (34) Lawyer Hugh Tomlinson nailed it in very few words when it came to the kind of proposals Lord Justice Leveson should put forward. Here’s the highlights and why no-one should have a problem with them.

And that’s the end of another blogtastic week, blog pickers. Not ‘arf!

Petronella? Wyatt I Never!

Most people will not have heard of Petronella Wyatt, except perhaps a few who remember that she had a four year affair with London’s occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, which resulted in her getting pregnant and Bozza being fired from the opposition front bench by Michael Howard not for having the affair, but for lying to him about it.

But it will not come as a surprise to know that Ms Wyatt is a Tory, her being the daughter of Woodrow Wyatt, who had been a Labour MP but later became an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and a behind the scenes fixer for Rupert Murdoch, leaving behind three volumes of diaries so unreliable that Tory historian Robert Blake concluded that Wyatt was a “notorious liar”.

So Petronella knows all about dishonesty, which has served her well in her journalistic career, notably in exaggerating the number of times her mother has been knocked down by cyclists, which actually caused the Mail On Sunday to publish a correction. And today has brought another suspect slice of her commentary, this time in the Maily Telegraph, about her brief encounter with Oxford University.

“I was bullied out of Oxford for being a Tory” she whines, telling tearfully how she abandoned her studies after going up to Worcester College in 1986. She was a Tory, and worst of all, her father was close to Mrs T. So not only her fellow students, but also some of the staff, gave her a hard time, just because she wasn’t a trendy lefty, resulting in her returning to London after only a few weeks.

Sadly for the credibility of this story, it is not possible to read it without the bullshit detector sounding regularly. Why this should be is not hard to fathom: rather a lot of Tories managed to survive their 1980s encounter with Oxford, not least Ms Wyatt’s former lover Bozza, along with Young Dave and his present next door neighbour Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the Seventeenth Baronet.

But what about the women who went up to Oxford? Well, there are plenty of those who managed not to get frightened off, too, not least one Louise Daphne Bagshawe, the same one who married Peter Mensch and precipitated the Corby by-election. And Harriet Baldwin, who sits for West Worcestershire, went up to Oxford in 1978 and managed to complete her studies.

Jane Ellison, who represents Battersea, also survived Oxford. And Ms Mensch joined the Tory Party aged 14: hers was not a case of being of the left when young, only to turn right later. Plenty of younger Tory women also survived their encounter with the dreaming spires, and combined with Petronella Wyatt’s previous form for being economical with the factual analysis, leaves only one conclusion.

This is another slice of bunk written to order. No change there, then.

UKIP – Not Even A Dead Parrot

The Tories used to have great fun at the expense of the Liberal Party, and for a while the Lib Dems too: the latter would be characterised in terms of the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch, although Margaret Thatcher never really understood that this was supposed to be humorous. When they lost a seat to them in a by-election, the dead parrot was said to have merely twitched.

But the Liberals, and their Lib Dem successors, did indeed win by-elections, as well as having an increasing presence at General Elections. It is this thought, as I described yesterday, that is not being allowed to enter as many right-leaning pundits approach panic mode over the UKIP performance in three by-elections on Thursday, in which they won no seats at all, despite favourable publicity.

And there was no more favourable publicity than that afforded UKIP by the Maily Telegraph, where editor Tony Gallagher – being talked about as a potential successor to the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail – appears to be telling the Tories that they must make their peace with Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and his motley rabble, or at least turn to the right pretty sharpish.

So Thursday’s paper carried an article of Ron Hopeful quality from Harry Wallop, which walloped absolutely nobody with its lame rhetorical question “Could this be UKIP’s day?”, because it couldn’t. Even with a Roma population of 3,500 in the Rotherham area, and therefore plenty of whipping boys on hand, and the fostering row, UKIP could not do what the old Liberals did in Orpington and Ripon.

Like the assembled hosts of Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) over the US Presidential Election, the Telegraph’s hacks had substituted belief for reality: UKIP was going to win because they wanted it to. And even after the party came second, in a poll where less than 35% of the electorate turned out, there was almost universal approval of Farage and his pals as potential Tory soulmates.

Even before the result, Ed “Case” West was talking up the party’s prospects: “Tonight, Ukip have a chance to show the world they're more than just a protest vote for angry Tories”. And mere defeat didn’t stop the punditry, with Tim Stanley (who you can tell as he’s a doctor) proclaiming “After Rotherham, Ukip is now a national populist party – a magnet for anger at the British establishment”.

He was joined by Peter Mullen, aka Reverend Batshit, who warned “the Tories’ support is draining away to Ukip like flood water ... UKIP is the one party where now you can find Tory values”. MEP and occasional Tory Dan, Dan the Oratory Man proclaimed that UKIP was now the main opposition to Labour in northern England. Who knows, perhaps they’ll suggest Farage “prepare for Government” next.

Yes, David Steel was wrong all those years ago. But at least his party had MPs.

Leveson – What He Said

Not everyone at the Leveson Report presentation yesterday was taking notes. And not everyone sounding off about it was even there. So it should surprise no-one that one or two details failed to make the newspaper coverage today, not least that the industry was so desperate to head off the potential acceptance of the recommendations by politicians that it was lobbying Leveson beyond all deadlines.

This revelation may not have been in the Executive Summary to which all media organisations have had access. But it was in Leveson’s statement: Lords Hunt and Black had presented to him a yet further revision of their “PCC 2” idea after the report had gone to the printers. There could be no other reason but to try and steal the thunder of what would be in the Report.

In any case, Leveson was clear that the Hunt and Black proposals – all of them – fell well short of what he considered acceptable. This was because what was being proposed did not give the proposed regulator independence from the press, nor the freedom from interference by proprietors and editors. Hunt and Black were still proposing that editors be allowed onto the main board of such a body.

Leveson was adamant that editors should not be allowed to influence any new regulator. This he told with no little feeling. The reason is not hard to find: when Richard Desmond pulled his titles from the PCC, it wasn’t just to save money. Indeed, being outside could make future legal actions more costly for him. There was also the presence of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre to consider.

Dacre had been equally adamant in his evidence before the Leveson Inquiry that any regulator needed editors to be part of it. Leveson showed by both the tone and content of his presentation that this had not persuaded him. Perhaps Hunt and Black will also reveal – as they seem to like giving out information – what input Dacre and his pals are providing for the so-called Free Speech Network.

What Leveson also said – and what is to no surprise also not being reported today – was that a free press was in the public interest, and that he was at all times considering the public interest. That was the first reason why he asserted that there must be legislation: the legal duty of Government to ensure press freedom, that is, free from political interference of any kind.

In doing so, Leveson was offering the press the equivalent of what in the USA is contained within the First Amendment of the Constitution. It would be a form of statute, but then, so is the US Constitution, and the latter is lauded by those across the political spectrum, especially on the right. Instead, the press is smearing and baying, its reporting selective and dismissive.

For some, that is preferable to listening and taking notes. No change there, then.